28th
Deprivation: Day Five
Back at work today. The theme of the day is integration. Or to be more specific, how mobile technology has become central to how I do my work. It’s had an unexpectedly isolated feeling—even within the crowd.
As a business consultant, my colleagues and I do a lot of work on white boards. After a meeting today, my usual end-of-meeting practice of taking a camera phone photo of the whiteboards and sharing with fellow participants was interrupted.
The stack of images that I have available to me in my own private cloud are an indispensable reference of what was discussed on a particular day, in a particular place. But what to do when the indispensable must be, well, dispensed with?
Walking back from lunch, I have a soda bottle cap with me. I collect these Coke Rewards points. No idea what I’ll ever do with my points, but I collect. And there’s an app for that, so I usually capture and post those points at the time of consumption. Today, I was holding on to that bottle cap, waiting for a later opportunity to find a computer.
I’m a Google Voice user, which is incredibly useful for a consultant like me who may be at any number of work and client sites in a given day. Being able to have calls follow me, rather than the other way around, is a useful gain for me and my clients.
But today, I’m just out for lunch. That call will go to voicemail. The voicemail system will transcribe that call and send it to an email box that I can’t monitor from my lunch-time restaurant space. I’ll check that voicemail…later, when I catch up to it.
Sure hope no one needs me just then. Or, if I’m unexpectedly on the side of the road with a disabled vehicle—hope I don’t need someone else, either.
